Downtown Los Angeles boasts some big-city perks like spacious lofts and trendy restaurants, but living there is a different kind of beast. By Mike Armstrong July 17, 2011 "Look, Daddy, that man's going to the bathroom!" No, not the words any daddy wants to hear from his 10-year-old daughter, especially during a stroll through their brand-new neighborhood. Moving my wife and kids into a downtown Los Angeles loft may not win me "Dumbest Dad of the Year" honors, but it should at least get me into the quarterfinals. The loft itself was great. More like a movie set than an...

A Mexican national who has been deported at least three times since being convicted in Ramsey County of sexual assaulting a 12-year-old girl was again found in the United States and jailed after traffic infractions, federal authorities said. Juan Dominguez-Soriano, 35, of Little Canada, was being held in the Carver County jail Friday afternoon at the direction of immigration officials on a charge of illegal reentry into the United States.Dominguez-Soriano was picked up Feb. 6 for failing to provide a driver's license and proof of insurance, according to the U.S. attorney's office for Minnesota.

MEXICO CITY - As his fellow officer was dying in the seat beside him after gunmen ambushed their vehicle this week, U.S. special agent Victor Avila, wounded himself, telephoned the U.S. Embassy here to shout that they were under attack. Avila and Jaime Zapata were traveling in an armored Chevrolet Suburban with diplomatic license plates on a popular four-lane highway four hours north of Mexico City. They were returning from a meeting with fellow agents in Monterrey, who had met them at a halfway point near San Luis Potosi to exchange technical equipment. According to U.S. officials who spoke on...

Former first lady Barbara Bush said on Greta Van Susteren's "On the Record" this past week: "We've got a real problem in public schools. ... This is a national crisis. It's as bad as anything in our country." When Van Susteren was pointing out from Bush's own op-ed piece that "Texas (is) 36th in the nation in high-school graduates (and) 3.8 million Texans don't have a high-school diploma," Bush said, "No more, you're killing us." Bush was commendably protecting Texas pride as she told Van Susteren not to cite any further degrading statistics about the state of Lone Star education,...

Said Jaziri was seen getting in the trunk of a smuggler's car by bystanders, captured only by luck and their patriotism. When chaos reigns supreme in a nation that shares an almost two-thousand mile border with the United States, and that border is not protected to the extent it should be, undesirable elements sneaking their way from Mexico into the U.S. becomes the rule instead of the exception. We have all been made aware of the drug shipments that come into the U.S. through the porous and undermanned Mexican border, and we all know of the steady stream of Mexicans...

NUEVO LAREDO— The city's newest police chief was killed late Wednesday night when unknown assailants blocked off a downtown street shortly after he had left police headquarters and machine-gunned his vehicle. Manuel Farfan Carriola, a retired Mexican Army general, had been outspoken about fighting crime in his city, especially drug traffickers who are fighting for control of lucrative illegal trading routes. He was named to the position when the new mayor, Benjamin Galvan Gomez, took office on Jan. 1. Farfan Carriola was usually accompanied by several bodyguards and a personal assistant. Early reports indicated that some of those men may...

Reporting from San Diego — U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California in the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents. Said Jaziri, the former imam of a Muslim congregation in Montreal, was hidden in a car driven by a San Diego-area man who was pulled over by U.S. Border Patrol agents near an Indian casino east of San Diego on Jan. 11. Jaziri had allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling group $5,000 to get him across...

Federal agents early Thursday morning arrested 14 Ellensburg area residents related to criminal charges of manufacture and purchase of counterfeit identity and employment documents, according to a news release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Another 16 were taken into custody on administrative immigration violations, and three of those were later released for humanitarian reasons, according to the news release issued this morning. All 30 are Mexican nationals, according to ICE/HSI spokeswoman Lorie Dankers in Seattle, and the three released were women.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- A U.S. Border Patrol agent was fatally shot after he encountered several suspects in southern Arizona, officials announced Wednesday. Agent Brian Terry was killed late Tuesday near Rio Rico, Ariz., according to a statement released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. At least four suspects are in custody and another is still being pursued.

SAN DIEGO — A suspected drunken driver who killed five people when his car slammed into a group of motorcyclists has been released from custody in Southern California.The California Highway Patrol says Carlos Bobadilla of Mexicali, Mexico, was freed Sunday but could still face drunken driving charges when blood tests come back.

An eyewitness has come forward in the case of the American who was allegedly attacked by Mexican pirates to claim he saw the man's panicked wife as she fled to the American side of the lake. As a safety precaution, the witness spoke in shadow and with voice alteration to avoid identification because he said he feared for his life. "It was hard, just remembering everything about us going in to go take pictures and enjoying the sunny day and enjoying the nice weather," Tiffany Hartley, wife of missing David Hartley, told "Good Morning America" today, just hours after returning...

BUSTED Columbus man, 10 others arrested; 2,500 pot plants seized The pot-picking has been plentiful for authorities across Ohio this summer, but they had failed to find the men tending the lucrative cash crop. That changed Monday when more than two dozen officers from federal, state and local agencies surrounded woods in the river bottoms of Muskingum County as a marijuana work crew went about its business. Chasing some of the men as they fled along the Muskingum River, authorities arrested 10 Mexican nationals and charged them with conspiracy to cultivate marijuana in two carefully tended fields about 90 miles...

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 23 (UPI) -- The bodies of four decapitated and mutilated men were left hanging Monday at a bridge in Cuernavaca, Mexico, south of Mexico City, officials said. Officials said the bodies were discovered Sunday hanging by their ankles from the bridge and the heads were on the roadway beneath the bodies, El Universal reported Monday. Police said the slayings likely were tied to the drug wars.

Federal agents guarding the U.S.-Mexico border have been ordered to stay away from the most crime-infested stretches because they’re “too dangerous” and patrolling them could result in an “international incident” of cross border shooting.This unbelievable development was made public this week by a veteran law enforcement official in an Arizona county located along the Mexican border. In a video taped interview with a conservative newspaper, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever reveals firsthand accounts from U.S. Border Patrol supervisors stationed in his southeastern Arizona county. Middle and upper management won’t allow agents to work in certain violent portions of the border...

Jose Ezequiel Galicia Gonzalez, an alleged member of the Zetas criminal organization, was in federal court Wednesday for a competency hearing after he tried to kill himself with plastic cutlery. According to testimony given before U.S. Magistrate Judge Felix Recio, Galicia used either a plastic knife or a plastic spoon to cut his wrists and then slit his throat. According to defense attorney Reynaldo Cantu, Galicia almost succeeded and ended up in intensive care. Cantu stated that Galicia might suffer from a mental disease or defect and requested a psychiatric evaluation. Galicia will be evaluated by a court-appointed psychiatrist on...

Jackson County sheriff's deputies on Wednesday shot and killed an armed man guarding a marijuana garden deep in the woods north of Sams Valley. The sheriff's SWAT team was searching for the garden on BLM property at around 7 a.m. when they encountered a man armed with a loaded shotgun, law enforcement authorities said. Two deputies fired at the man, who is described as a Hispanic adult... A SWAT medic performed emergency aid on the man but he died at the scene, OSP said. After the shooting, deputies spotted a second man fleeing the area. He disappeared in the woods....

A man alleged to have been a member of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel and later of the Zetas criminal organization appeared in U.S. federal court Friday and – when he saw his mother, wife and sister in the room – broke down sobbing, his big frame shaking visibly. Wearing khaki pants, a wrinkled blue shirt and shackles on his wrists, Luis Alberto Blanco Flores, known as “El Pelochas,” appeared at a preliminary hearing as a follow-up to his arrest on July 23 for illegal entry to the United States. At the hearing, an agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement testified...

When measured by the number of criminal defendants charged with federal crimes by U.S. attorneys, the top five U.S. judicial districts for fiscal 2009 were all on the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, these five judicial districts are the only five on the U.S.-Mexico border—covering its entire expanse from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. There are 94 federal judicial districts covering the area of all 50 states, plus Guam, the North Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. In the Southern District of Texas, which covers a stretch of border from Brownsville past Laredo, the U.S. attorney’s...

... The ranches are said to be "near Mines Rd. and Minerales Rd. about 10 miles NW of I-35". Whether it is lone members or squads is not certain. Anonymous sources in law enforcement in the Laredo area tonight have passed on word that US law enforcement agencies are in the area and are weighing their options regarding the ranches. The media has been silent on this incident and some law enforcement in the area says that they are furious that the media is not reporting the whole story of the continued violence along the border. Their frustrations are understandable...

MEXICO CITY — Authorities found the remains of at least 23 people in a series of pits and scattered on the ground at a suspected drug-gang dumping site near the industrial hub of Monterrey in northern Mexico, an official said Friday. Investigators were using heavy equipment to search for more bodies at the rural site outside Mexico's third-largest city, local media said. Photographs showed charred spots on the soil suggesting some bodies may have been partially burned.

<p>MEXICO CITY — Mexico is facing a sort of perfect storm of floods that breed mosquitoes, prompting a big increase in the number of hemorrhagic dengue cases, the country's top epidemiological official said Wednesday.</p>
<p>The disease's Type 2 strain, which makes people who have already had the Type 1 variant more vulnerable to developing the hemorrhagic form, is now in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz and moving north toward the region on the U.S. border.</p>

loose network of Mexican-American women, some of whom may be illegal immigrants, have been responsible for helping numerous Afghan military deserters go AWOL from an Air Force Base in Texas, FoxNews.com has learned. Many of the Afghans, with the women's assistance, have made their way to Canada; the whereabouts of others remain unknown. Some of the men have been schooled by the women in how to move around the U.S. without any documentation. The Afghan deserters refer to the women as "BMWs" — Big Mexican Women — and they often are the first step in the Afghans' journey from Lackland...

King County prosecutors have filed theft charges against six members of a Bellevue mortgage company accused of helping illegal immigrants obtain home loans. In charging documents, prosecutors claim the bulk of Casalinda Mortgage's business came from illegal immigrants to whom firm employees had given false Social Security numbers. State regulators and the Secret Service launched an investigation into the business in July 2007 following an anonymous tip to the Department of Financial Institutions. Six people -- all related by blood or marriage -- have now been charged with felony theft. "The evidence showed that Casalinda employees knew that many of...

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico. Maywood is a warning to every city and town in America. The Maywood City Council announced this week that after years of radical policies, corruption and scandal, the city was broke and all city employees would be laid off and essential city services contracted out to neighboring cities or to L.A. County government. How did this happen? Until recently,...

While Americans march against Arizona's new restrictions on unlawful immigration, hundreds of illegal aliens from countries awash in Muslim terrorists tiptoe across the U.S.-Mexican frontier. New York, N.Y. — According to the federal Enforcement Integrated Database, 125 individuals were apprehended along the border from fiscal year 2009 through April 20, 2010. These deportable aliens included two Syrians, seven Sudanese, and 17 Iranians, all nationals from the three Islamic countries that the U.S. government officially classifies as state sponsors of terrorism. Federal authorities also track "special interest countries" from which terrorism could be directed against America. Over the aforementioned period, 99...

A Mexican drug cartel has issued an ominous death threat against U.S. law enforcement officers who seize their illicit product as reported by Sean Alfano for the Daily News: Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham said his officers received threats a couple weeks ago after off-duty police busted a pot smuggling ring. * * * Just which cartel made the threat remains unclear. Violent warnings toward American police are not new, but the Nogales incident marked the first time U.S. officials confirmed a threat. Meanwhile, the Mexican drug trafficking organizations have established permanent base camps "in strategic locations in the hills of...

About 3,500 acres of southern Arizona have been closed off to U.S. citizens due to increased violence at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The closed off area includes part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge that stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told Fox News that violence against law enforcement officers and U.S. citizens has increased in the past four months, forcing officers on an 80 mile stretch of Arizona land north of the Mexico border off-limits to Americans.

May 20: Four police officers have been shot, and two have died after a traffic stop in Arkansas escalated. NBC's Jeff Rossen reports two suspects in the incident have also died. WEST MEMPHIS, Arkansas - Two West Memphis police officers were fatally shot during a traffic stop on Thursday, and two men suspected in the shooting were killed after a manhunt, according to media reports.

ZAPATA COUNTY - Some members of Texas law enforcement are nervous about the possibility of terrorists crossing illegally into the U.S. Multiple government reports show people from countries that support terrorism have been entering the United States illegally through Mexico. Those countries include Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. worries drug cartels are teaming up with terrorists. "It's real. It's still real. It's still happening," he says. A congressional report says Middle Easterners, some with ties to Islamic terrorism, are buying fake documents with Hispanic-sounding last names to blend in on the border. The report...

MCALLEN - State law enforcement officials say spillover violence is happening. The state defines spillover as anything that includes violence or crime with a cartel connection. The Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety Steve McCraw says some of the violence can be measured because it goes unreported. "From our definition it's very simple. The state of Texas defines spillover violence as Mexican cartel related violence that occurs in Texas. We include aggravated assault, extortion, kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder," says McCraw. The federal government has a different definition for spillover violence. It defines it as violence as a...

Where is Bill Clinton?This ain't no Tea Party!Really, where is Bill Clinton? Wasn't he lecturing us just a week ago on protests could lead to violence? Where are all the media talking heads who echoed Clinton's absurd attempt to link the Tea Partiers to violence? Yet, here's a riot started by protesters against the new law in Arizona to toughen up enforcement on illegal immigration in Phoenix on April 23. Bottles were hurled at police and threats of violence that make even the rowdiest Tea Party look like a church picnic. You'll see the bottles thrown here, striking police officers...

Investigators reviewing surveillance footage, interviewing witnesses Authorities have launched a massive investigation after an explosive device was thrown over the fence of the American Consulate in Nuevo Laredo. Official confirmed that the attack happened around 11 p.m. Friday. Nobody was injured but the consulate and its office in Piedras Negras will be closed until further notice. "The Consulate General and Consular Agency will reopen when we are confident that we have adequate security to keep our visitors safe," consulate officials reported on their website. Both Mexican and American authorities are cooperating in a ongoing investigation. According to the Tamaulipas Ministry...

The MS-13 gang may have issued a hit on the NYPD, police sources said Saturday. The tip came last week from a cab driver in Brooklyn, whose hack friend overheard a gang member talk about a murder contract on police from the driver's back seat, sources said. The cabbie told cops the thug spoke about the group killing an officer in every command, sources said. "We're investigating the report based on an overheard conversation," said NYPD spokesman Sgt. Kevin Hayes. "At this time, there's nothing to indicate there's a city-wide threat." But sources said Gang Unit cops are pushing informants...

Is an “iron river” of weapons flowing south from Texas to Mexico, as U.S. officials claim? Or is that nothing more than a fiction promulgated by a corrupt Mexican government that skews statistics to deflect responsibility? The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is reloaded with millions in Recovery Act dollars to continue its Operation Gunrunner, which it says helps stop Mexican cartels from procuring the weapons to fuel their murderous turf battles. The program is expanding operations along the border, including in McAllen and El Paso, and adding more agents to work with U.S. Embassy and Consulate offices...

SNIPPET: "Somalis with ties to a terrorist organization are believed to be plotting to illegally enter the United States after being mistakenly released from custody in Mexico, a confidential federal law enforcement report said." SNIPPET: "Included in the group is Mohamed Osman Noor, 35, of Somalia, who U.S. officials suspect has strong ties to Al-Shabaab Mujahideen, an Islamist insurgency group in the ongoing war in Somalia with ties to al Qaeda. The report was written by an intelligence official with the Laredo Sector Border Intelligence Center, a joint federal task force under the Department of Homeland Security that operates on...

It was every parent’s worst spring-break nightmare come true: Fun in the sun somehow turned into a south-of-the-border bloodbath for 21-year-old Zeke Rucker. The vacationing Rutgers University graduate was discovered alone outside his resort hotel in the wee hours of the morning of March 16, bleeding and unconscious by a swimming pool. His heartbroken and horrified family has questions. American and Mexican officials don’t have any answers — or any immediate interest in finding out what happened to Zeke.

The Mexican military arrested a leader of the border gang Barrio Azteca in connection with the death of three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez. A Mexican federal police spokesman declined to release the name of the gang leader, but local media reports suggest that the leader is Ricardo Valles de la Rosa, who was arrested in a car Friday and held on a weapons possession charge. On March 13, Lesley A. Enriquez, a consulate employee, Arthur H. Redelfs, her husband and Jorge Alberto Salcido, the husband of a Mexican employee at the consulate, were killed after...

SANTA FE — Gov. Bill Richardson said Tuesday that New Mexico has increased its law enforcement presence along the Mexican border in the wake of the shooting death of an Arizona rancher. State Police and local sheriff's departments have increased patrols in border areas, as has the U.S. Border Patrol, according to a statement from Richardson's office. Police in Arizona are investigating the death on Saturday of Robert Krentz, a rancher in Cochise County, who was shot by an unknown assailant. "While we have invested money in local law enforcement along the border, we must continue to be on guard...

Robert Krentz, an Arizona rancher with ties to New Mexico, on Saturday was found shot on his ranch. Carol Capas, public information officer for the Cochise County Sheriff's Office, said there were no details available about the killing of Krentz, 58, on Sunday evening. She said Krentz's ranch is about 35 miles northeast of Douglas, Ariz. Caren Cowan, executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, said she grew up with Krentz's family in Arizona and counted Krentz as a member of the association. She said he joined in order to collaborate with New Mexico ranchers on issues such...

EAGLE PASS — Fueled by growing fears of drug-resistant tuberculosis, health officials from Texas and Mexico said Wednesday they are launching new cooperative TB programs in the last two major sister cities along the border that lack them. New federal funds will add staff in Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras and Del Rio-Ciudad Acuña, where 6 million border crossings a year make it difficult to follow patients through months of treatment or track their contacts to offer preventive care. Similar programs exist in other sister cities from El Paso to Brownsville. Statistics released in recent days have shown a mixed record of...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised on Tuesday to help Mexico broaden a drug war that has failed to curb traffickers' increasingly deadly power along the U.S.-Mexican border. Clinton, leading a top-level U.S. delegation in Mexico City for a day of talks, said it was time to tackle the deeper social issues that fuel the narcotics trade as both nations battle to outmaneuver powerful smuggling organizations. "These narcotics cartels are waging war on civil society," Clinton told a news conference, pledging that the joint U.S.-Mexican response would not be bound by "borders or bureaucratic divisions." Clinton...

WASHINGTON — Texas elected officials are “disingenuous or naive” to believe drug violence is spilling across the border into the United States, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said Friday. In a wide-ranging interview at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, Sarukhan attributed the recent escalation of violence in Ciudad Juárez to desperate attempts by narcotics kingpins to protect their shrinking turf, praised the Obama administration’s attempts to clamp down on the smuggling of U.S. weapons to the Mexican cartels and denounced the murders of journalists who cover the Mexican government’s bloody war against the nation’s powerful drug cartels. The Mexican envoy also...

SUSPECTED drug cartel "hit teams" have murdered an American consular employee and her husband in a Mexican border city and killed the husband of another consular official in two separate attacks. The victims came under fire in separate locations while driving in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez on Saturday... "The attacks resulted in three fatalities - two American citizens and one Mexican citizen," After the slayings, the State Department announced that US diplomats working in consulates along Mexico's northern border had been authorised to send family members home because of security concerns.

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama is "outraged" by the murders in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico of three people connected with the U.S. consulate there, a White House official said on Sunday. "In concert with Mexican authorities, we will work tirelessly to bring their killers to justice," White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement. A consulate employee and her husband, both U.S. citizens, were killed along with the husband of another employee who is a Mexican citizen, the statement said. "The president is deeply saddened and outraged by the news," Hammer said, adding that Obama "shares in...

The Mexican drug cartels have established supply lines, distribution networks and operation cells in 250 cities throughout the United States, and one of those locales is Austin, TX where the feds have busted an outfit tied to the Gulf cartel following a six-year investigation as reported by Noelle Newton for KVUE: Fourteen kilos of cocaine were seized in all, plus $400,000 of money and assets. Seventeen cartel members are now in jail. Pictures show how members got away with it for so long hiding guns, drugs and cash in unassuming homes. Meanwhile, along the northern Mexican cities along the U.S....

The vehicle, which rear-ended a pickup truck south of Phoenix, was operating illegally from Mexico, authorities say. Sixteen people are injured. Reporting from Denver - A bus operating illegally from Mexico and traveling through Texas and Arizona to Los Angeles slammed into the back of a pickup truck and rolled over early Friday morning in the Arizona desert, killing six passengers and injuring 16, authorities said. "No one walked away unscathed," Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesman Robert Bailey said from the crash scene, about 30 miles south of Phoenix. The bus company, Tierra Santa Inc. -- which has offices...

MEXICO CITY – An 80-year-old woman has joined her daughter and granddaughter in jail facing charges that they murdered a man to collect $2.4 million in insurance money, the Mexico City district attorney’s office said. All three women are accused in the death of 20-year-old Ruben Romero Reverte, who was found dead last August. The arrest of the grandmother, whose name was not released, came nearly two months after Leslie Arellanes, 20, and Roxana Arredon, 46, were taken into custody. The two younger women hoped to collect on five life insurance policies Romero had taken out with Arellanes’ grandmother as...

The Department of Public Safety is advising Texans on spring break to avoid Mexican border cities because of drug cartel violence. snip Parents should not allow their children to visit these Mexican cities because their safety cannot be guaranteed.

WESLACO - CHANNEL 5 NEWS learned the Zetas are out of Reynosa tonight. They've moved about 150 miles west to Nuevo Laredo. Our intelligence sources tell us the group wants to take over the city and make it their base of operations. The U.S. Consulate General's office has already confirmed a gunbattle in Nuevo Laredo. It's happening near Boulevard Colosio and the city's zoo. The consulate general's office is telling all U.S. citizens to take shelter until the fighting stops. CHANNEL 5 NEWS learned the Zetas are already calling in reinforcements. We're told 700 Zetas from around Mexico are joining...